Developers of Purdue’s Innovation District get a do-over on private apartments on campus, the first piece in a 450-acre plan

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – It took two tries, but the first piece is in place for the Innovation District, a vast western campus plan Purdue University trumpets could be worth $1.2 billion in private development one day.

Zoning for the refigured Innovation Place Apartments – a private, three-building complex planned on the site that once was home to some of Purdue’s Married Student Housing units – fairly easily won West Lafayette City Council endorsement Monday night.

The council had done the same in January with the first iteration of the new venture in campus housing, situated along State Street at MacArthur Drive. But Balfour Beatty Campus Solutions, a Malverne, Pennsylvania, developer, and Purdue Research Foundation, which owns the land, asked to redesign the project that will have roughly the same number of beds – 835 now vs. 841 in the original – and about half the retail space, down from 15,000 square feet to 7,852 square feet.

The undercurrent of the conversation Monday, though, was a testament to how easy it’s been lately to take for granted the swift growth on the edges to the West Lafayette campus.

On Monday, it played itself out, instead, in a conversation about parking and the accommodations the city made in the Innovation Place Apartments do-over. Instead of new garages or surface lots, the city allowed the developer to temporarily fold parking into dedicated space in existing Purdue garages for the next three years.

The idea, according to Erik Carlson, the city’s development director, was that with hundreds of acres of what he called a master project to fill over the next 20 years, Innovation District developers had promised to come up with shared parking of some sort that would serve more than just the 835 residents of Innovation Place Apartments. Why jam a piecemeal parking solution on the first piece of the puzzle?

What if Browning Investments, the Indianapolis-based firm Purdue Research Foundation hired in 2016 to recruit developers for Innovation District, came up short? Carlson said the city would pull the occupancy permit.

Not that he thought it would come to that.

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A sidewalk abruptly ends at a lot that was formerly married student housing Thursday, September 7, 2017, on the west side of the Purdue University campus in West Lafayette. Both the sidewalk and the married student housing were eliminated as part of the ongoing State Street Project.(Photo: John Terhune/Journal & Courier)

Larry Leverenz was among the council members who asked in various ways whether the city was setting a precedent that other developers would look to use. Council President Peter Bunder dropped the names of Loren King and Marc Muinzer – developers working on their own plans for three high-profile properties in the West Lafayette Village, including Chauncey Hill Mall – as he anticipated the return of proposals to use remote parking schemes to maximize land close to campus.

Carlson said size and scope – a couple of acres on the high side of the Village developments compared to more than 400 acres in the Innovation District – made all the difference.

The implication: Something’s coming next on west campus. And it won’t be long.

The city council came away assured, voting 7-1 in favor. (Council member David Sanders, a Purdue professor and an outspoken critic of President Mitch Daniels, voted against the plan, saying he believed it was another step in the privatization the university administration likes so much.)

Still, there was that pregnant pause …

Yeah, but what’s next?

Adam Chavers, senior vice president of Browning Investments, said the firm is close to showing an Innovation District master plan, which has been in the works for nearly a year-and-a-half. He said he expected to have something ready for the formal planning process in the next month or two.

Chavers has been preaching patience, even as county planners and even Daniels have publicly wondered what’s taking so long. (In September, Daniels told the J&C that he’d been riding the Purdue Research Foundation and Browning teams: “Let’s get going.”)

Daniels championed the Innovation District as a live-work-play, community-within-a-community concept that could fold residential, retail, office and industrial. Browning was hired to come up with a vision for that 450 acres and then recruit developers to slowly build it out.

This map shows the outline of a project Purdue is dubbing its Innovation District. It will combine space for housing, retail and industry on the western edge of campus.(Photo: Provided by Purdue University)

Purdue’s stake in making sure the build out is not too slow is the fact that recouping the $60 million share the university fronted for the $120 million State Street project depends in a large way on taxes collected in that district. No development, no taxes. And Purdue would be on the hook.

Chavers was vague about what would drop next.

“It probably won’t be residential this time,” Chavers said. “It will be more of a mix of innovation spaces – office space, retail space, that type of thing. … We want to make sure we’re getting it right.”

In recent weeks, there has been some murmurs among local real estate circles that the Innovation District could include single-family homes of some sort.

“The size of the blank canvas out here is one of the great assets of this larger development opportunity,” Chavers said. “It allows for a tremendous range of uses. And single-family or other for-sale residential we think would be a great campus-edge component.”

He said Browning is “kind of fleshing out what a single-family residential component might look like.”

“But we think that’s something that would work and fit out there,” Chavers said.

Beyond that, Chavers said he couldn’t say right now.

“Soon,” he said.

The answer to the question – Yeah, but what’s next? – will have to wait a bit longer.